Labours of Love Lost in 'Lavender Hill Mob'

To me, the early Ealing comedy strikes the most remarkable balance: beautifully made, written, performed, they are playful anthems to lightly anarchic nonconformity, ‘little men [and women] up against it, and yet they remain charmingly eccentric pictures of post-war, peacetime England. “The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), is a perfect place to start, as Henry ‘Dutch’ Holland (Alec Guinness), a meek bank clerk in charge of bullion delivery, longs to be rich but can’t figure out how. Meeting his new neighbour Alfred ‘Al’ Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), he discovers an inspired way to finally smuggle the gold out of England and together with the rest of the gang (Sidney James and Alfie Bass), they devise a fantastic plan to seize their fortune. It’s all very exciting and suspenseful, and for quite a while they mislead the bank as well as the police. But interspersed in the ‘chase’ of the plot are memorable, moving moments of common aspiration which make me love the film even more.

When we open in exotic Rio de Janeiro where Holland lives in real style, his recollections take us back to when he was ‘merely… merely… a non-entity among those thousands who flock every morning into the city,’ and the leisurely rumba fades to an almost Victorian scene of foggy, crowded London Town. His 2 decades of serving and waiting with the deferential bow of his head endear you to this ‘honest man,’ especially when he meets Pendlebury (another honest man who longs to be free of the drudge of labour) who innocently sets them in motion when he muses that the saddest words are these: ‘it might have been.’ In fact (much like a few gently subversive Soviet Thaw comedies), everything comes to rights with a twist at the end. The getaway continent proves a slippery slope, and conventional law and morality must prevail. But what a lovely escape it is while it lasts: at least for Dutch – and for any of us with wildly unlikely daydreams and hopes – he had ‘one superb year’ Xo

(Also, how fun to be writing about this just as UK TV decides to air the film again, on Alfie Bass' birthday :'))